Professional Democrats, like the proverbial dog who returns to his vomit, cannot quit the idea that their grotesque caricatures of those who hold traditional views of marriage and family, men and women, borders and citizenship, and meaningful employment will appeal to enough of the electorate to return control of the government to them. Donald Trump...
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Pushed Only So Far
Violent crime in California dropped for the first nine months of 1993 over the same period in 1992, reported attorney general Dan Lungren last winter. But statistics are of no comfort, and Lungren knows it. During the same press conference he even said so: “The reason people are more worried today than they ever have...
Seized by the Moment
Boyhood Produced and distributed by IFC Directed and written by Richard Linklater Richard Linklater’s Boyhood became the critics’ darling upon its staged release at the end of 2014. From The New Yorker to the Daily News, reviewers have vied with one another to sing its praises. Most of them think it’s a natural coming of...
The State of Catholicism
The post-conciliar Church's efforts to bring Christ into the modern world have brought the modern world into the Church. The Church is not moving the world; the world is moving the Church.
Thoroughly Modern Muslims
Allah (ta’ala) said, {They thought that their fortresses would protect them from Allah but Allah came upon them from where they had not expected, and He cast terror into their hearts so they destroyed their houses by their own hands and the hands of the believers. So take warning, O people of vision} [Al-Hashr:2]. In...
Waugh After Waugh
When, after a stint in the British Army which left him crippled for life, Auberon Waugh went up to Oxford in 1959, by his own admission he knew nothing of the place apart from what he had read in his father’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, describing the Oxford of 35 years earlier—and in Sinister Street, portraying...
Why Joe May Be Courting Stacey
Of 895 slots in the freshman class of Stuyvesant High in New York City, seven were offered this year to black students, down from 10 last year and 13 the year before. In the freshman class of 803 at The Bronx High School of Science, 12 students are black, down from last year’s 25. Of...
At War With the Military
The motive behind the proposed repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is, hmmm … what, exactly? A stronger military? Better projection of American might in tight corners like Afghanistan and South Korea? Well, not precisely any of that. The whole idea of opening military enlistment to professed gays is the furtherance...
Who’s Afraid of Being Homophobic?
Who’s afraid of being labeled homophobic? A great many people, that’s who, importuned incessantly by the liberal media and other keepers of the woke flame of proper public behavior. That behavior trends ever more left-wing, collectivist, and anti-Western—following Barack Obama’s “arc of the moral universe.” The Supreme Court’s recent decision to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for...
Screen
Goodbye, Peter Pan The Big Chill; Directed by Lawrence Kasdan It is unique in that it has something for virtually everyone to hate. Consider the characters, all eight. They are the types of people that our parents warned us about in the late 60’s and early 70’s: not the drug pushers who lurked behind bushes,...
Letter from Italy: Signs of Hope in Veneto
The popular and fearless Stefano Valdegamberi, of Verona, speaks openly about Italy's corrupted political establishment, which is at odds with the true welfare of Italians.
The Next Intelligence Crisis
In the months since the attacks of September 11, 2001, we have heard a great deal about the need to repair the intelligence walls that should have been defending America. There is no question that the United States needs a much stronger and more proactive intelligence apparatus, both foreign and domestic, and I, for one,...
The Gay Takeover of American Conservatism
“The only way the gay rights movement can succeed in making society accept homosexuality as natural, normal, moral, and healthy is to first de-Christianize that society … and they are making headway.” That was the warning of paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan in his 2001 book, The Death of the West. His point was clear: there could...
Bring Me a Grape
What a peculiar, in some respects downright weird little world this fascinating biography introduces us to. Imagine a very clever, very plain, very spoiled little boy, born at the turn of the century into the intensely competitive upper-middle or lower-aristocratic class in Britain. Conventional success at sports, diplomacy, the professions, or business being ruled out...
Turn Left at the Renaissance
Siena is almost entirely a city of the later Middle Ages. The days of glory—artistic as well as political—were the 13th and 14th centuries, and by the time the city was absorbed by the Medici empire in 1552, it was already a place of memories, whose people were ridiculed by the Florentines (in Dante’s phrase)...
Onward, Christian Nationalist
Self-described Christian nationalists should be focused on repairing the disastrous mistake of liberalism and returning to objective moral foundations.
An Aristocracy of Warriors
In his seminal work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the nobility of medieval Europe reckoned martial valor to be the greatest of all the virtues. The feudal aristocracy, he said, “was born of war and for war; it won its power by force of arms and maintained it thereby. So nothing was...
Radio Days
In England, it used to be possible to drift into a doctorate-level education simply by listening to the radio. A child could begin with adventure serials and comedies, graduate to radio theater versions of classic plays and novels or documentaries about historical figures, and end up listening to an Oxford don talking about the Oxford...
How Does A Traditionalist Vote?
Recently, Dan McCarthy of the American Conservative had a piece asking, “How Does A Traditionalist Vote?” I would submit that an answer to that question can be gleaned by viewing this ad for Barack Obama, brought to my attention by one of America’s leading traditionalist thinkers, Chris Kopff. In it, a tattoed college age woman implicitly compares voting for Barack...
Two Nations, Talking Past Each Other
Ron DeSantis succeeded, not only in vanquishing Gavin Newsome in debate, but more importantly in illustrating the wide gulf between the elite ruling class and ordinary Americans.
Macron in Washington
French President Emanuel Macron’s three-day visit to Washington started on an awkward note when he kissed an obviously uncomfortable President Donald Trump. The scene was a symbolic reminder that the two leaders do not enjoy an “intense, close relationship” invented by the media. In reality Macron is, both ideologically and temperamentally, the polar opposite of...
The Enduring Face of the Fake Right
It is hard to understand the continued presence of Jonah Goldberg as a conservative icon. Goldberg has the right to criticize Trump, yet he has turned himself into a nonstop Trump-hating machine, who manages to condemn anyone who still defends the president as a lunatic or criminal. Nietzsche once said mischievously that a good war...
The Magnetic Chain of Humanity
As Alan Wolfe noted in a broadside published in The New Republic in 2003, the study of American literature, especially in American Studies programs at our major universities, has, since the 1970’s, become little more than a vituperative exercise in anti-American polemics. Largely a confabulation of Latino, Native American, African-American, feminist, “queer,” and “whiteness” theorists...
Who Will Censor the Censors?
Who will censor the censors? That is a question asked increasingly by librarians and other defenders of pornography in the United States. At the University of Wisconsin, at least, we know the answer: it is the Board of Regents, who recently ordered the Union Council (a predominantly student or ganization) at the Madison campus to return...
Picking Up the Conservative Pieces
Conservatives, with and without an upper case “c,” have still not recovered from last year’s electoral disaster. Even the drama of the Conservative Party leadership election, and the surprisingly comfortable Conservative victory at the subsequent Uxbridge by-election, have not removed a general feeling on the right of shock and bemusement. Even now we cannot believe...
All Such Filthy Cheats
When Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman announced on January 18 his decision not to pursue confirmation as Secretary of Defense, he repeated Robert Massie’s old charge that William Safire is a plagiarist, saying this “does not, in my judgment, put [Safire] in a position to frame moral judgment on any of us, in or out...
Boris Johnson Is Bulletproof
For an informed insight into British politics, avoid the mainstream media. You would rest on a waterbed of misconceptions. The final ballot for the Tory leadership candidates closed with this result: Boris, 160; Hunt, 77; Gove, 75. So the top two go into a series of nationwide hustings, with the run-off put to Conservative Party...
The Golden State’s Lavender Jacobins
You knew it would come to this. So did I. And yet one is still surprised by the sheer boldness of it all. From my local paper: California public schools do an inadequate job of teaching students about gay and lesbian history, despite a 2011 law that requires schools to teach such lessons, according to...
Sighting Sylphs and Stalking Sense
One of the primary functions of literary criticism is to impose a certain order on the subject, the text. In a very basic sense, it can be thought of as a set of instructions for the reader of the text, not unlike those packed along with a dishwasher or a swing set. However, there is...
Middle American Helots
Rodney King is back, and his trial is center stage in the freak show of American television. The fact that these legal burlesques are called “the Rodney King trial” is worth pondering, because, the truth is, Rodney King now has immunity from prosecution for his reckless driving, for his violent attack on the officers who...
Moving Beyond Myths
“The difficulty in life is the choice.” —George Moore Please excuse the personal anecdotes scattered throughout this essay. As a woman, I found it difficult to write a standard third-person review and instead drew on my own experiences and emotions in responding to this book. Rejecting rationality, logic, and “vertical” thinking, I recognized that my...
Impeachable Offenses
Back in March, Republican Majority Whip Tom DcLay took lunch at the Washington Times and started jabbering about how he and his party were going to impeach “activist judges” who handed down improper rulings. I know something about how those luncheons at the Times work, so I was not as impressed as some people. First,...
Rediscovered Family
The Bush administration has rediscovered the family. A year ago, White House minions strove to torpedo the Final Report of the National Commission on Children, worried that its recommendation of tax relief for families with children might upset the hallowed “budget agreement” with Congress. Today, with one eye on the embers of Los Angeles and...
Charities Off the Dole
As of June 1, residents of the Land of Lincoln are free to enter into civil unions, which allow same-sex couples to enjoy the benefits, protections, and responsibilities under Illinois law that are granted to spouses. According to the richly appointed homosexual-rights movement that lavished funds and exerted pressure upon the politicians who passed the...
A Study in Courage
As one who dislikes “psycho-biography” as a genre, I was fully prepared to dislike this dual biography of Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson. I was somewhat disarmed by the author’s Introduction, in which she attributes to West the observation that it was impossible for biographers to know anything beyond the bare facts about the details...
Remembering T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot was a traditionalist, but he was also an aesthete, one who defended the independence of art and lauded the highly individualistic work of various modern poets. The caricatures never do him justice.
George Soros, Postmodern Villain
George Soros was born in Budapest in 1930 but, today, spends most of his time in New York City. Not much is known about his early years. He is the only eminent “holocaust survivor” who has been accused of collaboration with the Nazis. In 1947, he managed to sneak through the Iron Curtain, and, the...
Peri Bathous
From front cover to back, the total “package” of George Garrett’s new novel, Poison Pen, is a shuck and a con. No fictional work in recent memory is so elaborate a satire, and a reader would have to go back to the 18th-century Augustans to find its equal. To begin with, the jacket’s slick black...
Reading Obituaries
Reading obituaries is part of reading the newspaper and can be oddly rewarding. It’s instructive and even inspiring to read about lives and careers. Sometimes, we read about strangers, sometimes celebrities, sometimes even people we know—or knew. The gravity of the occasion requires a formulaic response: Without considering the matter, we all know how an...
On Morality in Film
In his review of John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama (In the Dark, June), George McCartney comments in detail and at great length on what he perceives to be the film’s merits. Some of these are real, though hardly worthy of the extravagant praise that McCartney bestows. He especially praises Pierce Brosnan for his portrayal...
The “Punishment” of Women
Questions concerning the relationship between morality and law were reignited when, during the Republican primary campaign, Donald Trump commented on the matter of abortion and (implicitly) women’s rights. When pressed by a journalist, Trump stated that, yes, women should be “punished” if their behavior is illegal or contrary to prevailing community standards. Though abortion is...
Free Speech or Federal Tyranny?
Today’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church has encouraged many decent conservatives to think that the United States will not so quickly go down the garden path of political correctness as Canada and the EU. I think this view is seriously mistaken. As everyone knows, the Westboro Baptist “Church”...
Marxism Misunderstood
In American Marxism, Mark Levin baldly misunderstands Marxism and tries to link it with woke totalitarianism and anarchism. But the term “Marxist anarchist” is an oxymoron and does nothing to help identify the real enemy.
Mixed Signals
Rudolph Giuliani in one of his first actions as mayor of New York City, eliminated a controversial set-aside program that had been instituted in 1991 by the Dinkins administration. Considering the extent to which the use of quotas now permeates American society, any victory for the merit system is reason for celebration. The policy in...
Jordan Peterson and the Unknown God
“All the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.” —Acts 17:21 To some, Jordan Peterson is a breath of fresh air. To others, a guru. Many find him and his ideas to be dangerous. Still others see him as a...
ELCAin’t
In a 1992 episode of the TV show Cheers, the slow-witted bartender Woody is distressed to find out on his honeymoon that he has just entered a “mixed marriage.” He belongs to the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), and his bride is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Among Woody’s concerns is...
The Danish Swift
Why, after half a century, Peter Freuchen’s Arctic Adventure has to be rescued from virtual oblivion is one of the true puzzles of literary anniversaries. Not quite a best-seller in its day, it nonetheless went into five printings and then fell, almost precipitously, into its curious obscurity. Retrospective itself as it looked back to Freuchen’s...
The Ideological Temptation of the Media
There have been, in recent decades, two focal points around which radical, utopian ideologies could concentrate. As a result, these two focuses-labor unions and youth-were surrounded by a veritable cult, and they acquired power, both political and cultural, even though the second of the two focuses was not, as such, organized, let alone structured. Power...
Trumped-Up Document Dump
“Can’t we just drone this guy?” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reported, by several sources, to have asked in a meeting at the State Department in 2010. The “guy” in question was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and after the stunt he pulled in the early morning hours of October 4, Donald Trump and Hillary...
Letter From the Argentario: Local Color
The promontory of Monte Argentario, billowing on the clothes line of the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy like an Hermes shirt held in place by three pins of land, is famous for its summer resort towns of Porto Ercole and Porto Santo Stefano. The shirt, which has been lost so suddenly by so many here in...